


Thousand Eyes

by MercuryAlice



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Caryl if you squint, Character Study, F/M, Gen, PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-16
Updated: 2016-03-16
Packaged: 2018-05-27 02:37:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6266212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MercuryAlice/pseuds/MercuryAlice
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>‘You’re supposed to want to be the coffee grounds.’</p>
<p>She didn’t, at the time. Her split second reaction had been an identification with the egg. Forced into boiling water and hardened by it, irreparably. Something weak and able to be cracked, made diamond under the blistering heat of circumstance until it was was impenetrable. Something that could have its skin cracked and peeled away and still retain itself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Thousand Eyes

_ ‘I'll be the calm _

_ I will be quiet _

_ Stripped to the bone, I wait _

_ No, I'll be a stone, I'll be the hunter _

_ A tower that casts a shade’ _

**_-Thousand Eyes by Of Monsters And Men_ **

  
  


The analogy burned bright in her mind. 

 

_ ‘You’re supposed to want to be the coffee grounds.’ _

 

She didn’t, at the time. Her split second reaction had been an identification with the egg. Forced into boiling water and hardened by it, irreparably. Something weak and able to be cracked, made diamond under the blistering heat of circumstance until it was was impenetrable. Something that could have its skin cracked and peeled away and still retain itself. 

 

Not something that dissolved into a nothingness of changed form. 

 

She wasn’t nothing. She didn’t dissolve. 

 

Her skin may have peeled away, but underneath she remained unbroken. Or so she told herself in her less clouded moments. She was the egg, and that was terrifying. Smooth and impenetrable as marble, taking away lives at a rate she never would have imagined when she was raw. 

 

It wasn’t even that she felt guilty. It was that she wanted to. She wanted to drag in every breath over jagged glass, knowing that she’d cut short so many lives. But she didn’t. That was the crux of it. The deadly need to feel as one should. She’d killed them, and she felt nothing but relief, and it was going to eat her alive. 

 

She was supposed to feel something other than that. A spark of regret. Of Humanity. But she didn’t, and that was what she choked on. Like ash in her mouth, it settled against her tongue and made her force back a hacking cough. At the end of the day, she felt nothing except relief. The lack of remorse was what weighed on her, sinking her under a hundred miles of concrete until it felt like her lungs would burst for the effort of drawing breath. 

 

The reality in the cold light of day, reflected in the mirror, that said  _ ‘They had it coming. I had no choice. It was them or me. And I chose right’. _

 

Carol had no answer to that. Because it was right. But shouldn’t she feel something? Some tinge of regret that kept her up. The only thing that kept her up was a body count and the disconnection she felt to it. It was over, they we’re dead, she was alive. And she was glad about that. 

 

_ I had no choice. _

 

_ It was them or me. _

 

_ I chose right.  _

 

It was over.

 

Except it wasn’t. She could play a role until the stars collapsed in on the sky and it wouldn’t make it true. She killed them and she felt nothing. They burned to ashes around her and she stepped over as if they were so much refuse. A nothing to be forgotten and put aside.

 

They’d been people like her once, hadn’t they? Her mind said no. They weren’t like her. They were nothing. They were threats to be just as soon dead and buried as looked at.

 

She hadn’t always been like this. Had she. She remembered, vaguely. And it burned her, even if she was nothing but a charcoal shadow against paper; hollow and empty as it was. Singes rising up the edges of her that demanded attentions. She hadn’t always been this.

 

She felt like a wolf in sheep’s clothing. A danger to everyone in Alexandra, even as she walked as a ghost among them. 

 

It ended tonight.

 

The pack laid heavy against her shoulder, like a weight of responsibility that never quite broke the surface of her veneer. She would endure, even if it meant making sure no one else bore the brunt of the violence that had managed to seep through her skin and into her bones until it wove itself into her very being, with barely an sound to it aside from a few gunshots in hazy memory. 

 

“Hey.” The voice was an accusation from behind her. He knew she was leaving and wanted to know why. She had no answers.

 

Carol turned, briefly; a breath leaving her and taking any lingering moral quandaries with it. She turned back and walked on, ignoring the sound from from up on the wall watch post. 

 

_ ‘Hey!’ _

 

_ ‘Carol!’ _

 

_ ‘What the fuck?!’ _

 

Vanishing into the dark before she could be confronted with questions, Carol walked on; as if she could walk fast enough to outrun the lack of empathy that dogged her every step.

  
  



End file.
